Flashback: Do You Remember Those Racist Condi Rice Cartoons?

As liberals continue to counter the criticism directed towards Ambassador Susan Rice with the race card, Eliana Johnson at National Review aptly noted how similar criticism was lobbied at Condoleezza Rice when she was nominated for Secretary of State. : I made a note of this before in my previous post, Deciphering Susan Rice without Being Racist — but I only cited Katrina Vanden Heuvel’s statements. : Vanden Heuvel is the editor and publisher of the far left magazine, The Nation, but Johnson detailed on November 21 how other media outlets and members of Congress were hurling the same accusations of incompetence and politicking we see in the midst of Rice’s plausible nomination for Secretary of State. Johnson wrote that:

[Condoleezza] Rice’s nomination, noted the: Washington Post, garnered “the most negative votes cast against a nominee for that post in 180 years.” As the Senate debated her nomination, Senator Barbara Boxer charged that Rice “frightened the American people” into supporting the Iraq War; Senator Jim Jeffordsaccused her of being part of an effort to “distort information” in the service of “political objectives”; and Senator Pat Leahy, who voted in her favor, endorsed her by saying that her tenure as national-security adviser lacked “strong leadership, openness, and sound judgment.” :

Hey, that’s racist. : But so is this cartoon by Ted Rall, who has the then-Secretary of State saying she was Bush’s ‘house nigga.”

Jeff Danziger, whose cartoons are syndicated in The New York Times, had a caricature of “a: big-lipped, barely literate Condoleezza Rice, nursing the aluminum tubes cited by the White House as evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

Johnson is dead on in her assessment that there’s a difference when someone calls you a “house nigga,” and when someone calls you incompetent. : One is blatantly racist, while the other isn’t. : It’s not that hard to comprehend. : Ambassador Rice misled the American people : — and we deserve answers.

Matt Vespa

Matt Vespa is a conservative blogger based in Virginia. Besides contributing to Right Wing News, Vespa writes for RedState, PJ Media, Independent Journal Review, and his personal blog Noodle Pundit. He's also the 2013 recipient of American for Prosperity Foundation's Andrew Breitbart Award For Excellence In Online Activism and Investigative Reporting